


The Naming of Cats

by jenna_thorn



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 18:59:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faith and Draco discuss redemption. Written pre- series end and contradicts canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Cats

_The naming of cats is a curious matter...  
\----- TS Eliot_

Continent hopping scrambled her time sense for days but Faith guessed that the night was still young as she swung, loose hipped and grinning, out of the London club. _Leavin' early. Gettin' old,_ she thought. _Or the Watcher's rubbing off on me._

Stifling a snort at the thought of Giles rubbing on anyone, she caught a sound, almost a bubbling chirp, from ahead. She slid her back to the rough brick at the mouth of the alley and paused to listen and shake off some of the fuzz from the whiskey.

She could hear two voices, maybe three, speaking too quietly to pinpoint the words, but they didn't sound English. Or even American. The thought made her smile as she stepped into the alley, and the way the cloaked figure before her spun in reaction just made her grin harder. _Travel around the world, Cairo to Finland, and it's all still smoke and alleys._ She caught his left arm with a block and smashed her right palm into his nose. Warm blood flowed over her hand. _Shit, maybe it's a human,_ she thought and backed off instead of pressing the attack.

She got a half look at a kid with white blond hair folded over himself slumped against the alley wall before the man in the hooded cloak stepped toward her. She backpedaled, shaking his blood off her hand, spattering the brick wall, as she said, "So, you got a chance to talk. You the bad guy? 'Cause **I'm** a good guy, and … ." She was bowled over as the hooded figure was shoved into her from behind and she caught the edge of an elbow as the kid flailed, throwing wild punches and cussing a blue streak.

"Look kid," she sputtered, "Much as I like the help, I'm doing better without you getting in the way."

He snarled back, "I don't need…" and took a right cross to the chin, lifting him up and away from the fight and nicely out of her way. She slid to the left, stepped around the big guy and brought both hands down solidly across the divot where his neck met his skull. _Uhhunh,_ Medulla Oblongata _, my ass. Call it the sweet spot and be done with it,_ she thought as she turned to the kid, flat on his butt in the mud and looking pissed off about it. She rubbed her jaw where he'd knocked against her. Machismo or not, she was tired of dealing with his shit.

He struggled to his feet, caught in what she now saw were black robes. He shot her a glare that might have scared off a kitten, or maybe Willow, and kicked the downed guy solidly.

She grabbed his upper arm and yanked him away. "He's down, leave him be." He struggled out of her grip and she grabbed the back of his robes more roughly. "What does it take for you to quit?" She threw him toward the street and his knee gave way, dumping him back on the street. He jerked at his robes again, pulling them awry.

"You don't know what you are dealing with, Muggle."

"Yeah well, I'm not the one sitting in the mud with blood on my face."

"You **do** have blood on your face."

She swiped at her cheek. "It's not mine." She gave a wolfish grin. "Makes all the difference in the world."

Even with the splashing the kid was doing getting up, she heard the scrape of a booted foot and anticipated the big guy's attack. _Someone needs to teach these guys that height is only an advantage to someone who tries to go toe to toe._ She dropped into a leg sweep, but only caught an ankle as he hopped out of range. The kid was a blur to her right as he threw himself, almost flying at the guy, his desparation evident in his frantic and uncoordinated attack.

The guy in the cloak dropped his hand to his waist and that got her attention. She shoved the kid away for his own good and popped the big guy's knee out with a side kick, then tagged his instep with her heel for good measure before crossing up his arms in hers, stepping inside his range to minimize his height advantage. That put them in enough of a tangle that they were both immobilized for a moment, but as she tried to sweep him properly, he had a sneaky she couldn't counter. With a pop like an empty two liter hitting the floor, he disappeared - just vanished - leaving her to kick air and drop face down in the dirty London alleyway.

"Fucking magic," she spat out with dirty water.

"Are you all right?"

"Five by five." The kid didn't try to help her up, which was probably for the best given her mood.

"What?"

"I get that a lot. Let's clear the scene." Black streaks on his hair and face showed where he'd been shoved up against the rough brick, black with smoke from a fire she could no longer smell. Whatever surge of anger had led him to jump his attacker left in a rush she could almost see and he dropped as though stunned, eyes open but not seeing. _Or at least,_ she re-thought, _not seeing me_.

"He was trying to kill me."

"Seriously?"

He shot her a look of scorn.

"Did he have a reason?"

He glanced at his arm. "Yes, yes, he did."

She backed up a step and crossed her arms. "You gonna tell me that I'm gonna regret saving your skinny ass?"

That got another dirty look, with a half-hearted sneer to boot. "Depends, if you are a **hero** ," he said with scorn, "on the side of fields of daisies and kittens and sweets, then you are the enemy of my enemy and therefore my ally, I suppose."

"Dude, you lost me at kittens. Good guy, bad guy, not that hard a question."

"Harder than you might think."

That earned him a smile of her own, and a hand to pull him off the bricks, "Been there, Done that. Still wearing the t-shirt. C'mon, up and at 'em." She snapped her fingers. "He might have friends."

"He does," he said in a waver, shaking his head as though to clear it, then wincing and bringing both hands to his scalp.

"Up, up, on your feet, pip pip and cheerio or whatever the hell it is you say here." He finally reached up and took her hand gingerly, gangly and teenaged and completely unlike Spike, the anti Spike, except for being blond and British and male and sort of cute maybe once he'd cleaned his face. Ah, no, there was the Spike sneer. "Dude, that's … Do they teach you that in school here or what?"

"What?" he echoed.

"Never mind. **Out** of the quaint English mud," _and out of the open_ she thought and she pulled him to his feet, his antiSpike hair loose and flopping in his eyes, and he slid into his pocket the flimsiest stake she'd ever seen. Turned wood and not even pointed. Completely useless.

He clutched at the wall for support and she winced as she saw the glisten of a blood trail along the dark brick. "We'll get you somewhere to sit down, I promise, but we have to get you out of here, now." She slid her arm around his waist and though he stiffened, he didn't pull away. They stumbled a bit then found a pace that let his limp look like a swagger. "You okay?"

"I'm…confused."

"You know who that was."

"Unfortunately, yes."

"There are scary things in this world. Sometimes they wear familiar faces."

He rubbed at the corner of his mouth. "I'm discovering that."

She let him mull that over and tried not to think too hard about it herself while she found another of the tiny pub signs at ground level that she still couldn't get used to. Bars should have neon and lines of wanna-bes out front behind grimy velvet ropes, not be buried under office buildings and filled with grandmothers drinking slightly alcoholic lemonade. But they needed a place to sit, and from the weight he was trying not to put on her, he needed to rest that knee. And she desperately needed a sink and a tictac. Or a beer. **And** a beer.

She shoved him toward the central bar with growled instructions to get food and then headed for the tiny sign that pointed to just as tiny a washroom. Cold water was all she got, but it was enough to spit out the last of the gritty mud and rinse the blood from the already healed scratches on her palms.

She ran both hands through her hair and wandered back into the bar to find him at a table. He slid out, probably headed to the men's to clean up, too, as she slid into the booth. Or maybe he was just avoiding her. At least he'd gotten her a beer. A mouthful determined that it was, in fact, **not** beer, but some weird ass apple cider shit. She slid that glass to the other side of the table and snagged the other, a dark something that wasn't American beer and she couldn't get why that was supposed to be good. It wasn't **right** anyway. The pubs here were older than she was, older than Boston was, and sometimes it felt like the world was conspiring to make her feel like the odd man out, stranger in a strange land or somesuch. Like she'd turn a corner and there'd be a unicorn there. Or a dragon.

A middle-aged frump came out with two plates of fried fish and the steak fries that they called chips but weren't, and Faith rolled her eyes as she realized she'd forgotten again to specifically ask for catsup, which wasn't catsup, it was tomato sauce and dammit. She sat flipping coasters and randomly laughing at the names on them until the antiSpike slid back into the booth across from her. He was barely limping and the small cuts on his face weren't bleeding anymore. She glanced at her own knuckles and decided not to mention it to him.

"You ready to talk?"

"No." He passed his hand over the glass and plate and murmured a few words. Somehow she doubted he was saying grace.

"Good." She dragged a limp fry through a puddle of vinegar and dangled it, flaccid and forlorn, over the fish.

He regarded her and the food with the same disdainful sneer. "And if I did feel some need to unburden my soul, why on earth would I do so here," and he gestured at the high wooden ceiling with a slightly shaking hand, "or to you?"

"Because I'm here," she said and pinned him with a look. "Because you've admitted that wasn't a mugging." She looked down again, letting him look away, and continued, "Because you can talk to me and I will walk away and you will never see me again."

He played with his fork, not yet brave enough to try the fries. "There is that, I suppose."

The fish tasted better than it looked, crisp and light, and she'd just shoved too much in her mouth to yell when he quietly asked, "What if you have allied yourself with the wrong side?" She did the next best thing, burying her forktines through his sleeve and into the table next to his wrist.

 _Wouldn't be the first time Wolfram and Hart used live bait_. She fought to keep her voice steady as she thought of Angel, of Gunn and very carefully not of Wesley, swallowed twice, and said quietly "Who sent you?"

The anger that had lit him up in the alleyway flashed and he wrenched at the fork. "What the? Fucking… I don't know who you are, all right? Quite honestly, I do not **care** who you are. I'm working through who **I** am." The fork came free and he tried to stand but his leg wobbled when he put weight on it and he slapped his hands on the table, anger making them tremble.

"Start with a name."

He was caught in a half crouch, not entirely standing. "What?"

"Who you are. Start with a name."

He sank back to the bench, wary. "That's … that's part of the problem."

"So change your name."

He turned his lips up in not-really-a-smile and took a long slow drink. She watched his throat work, watched the pulse of the carotid under the skin.

The English just didn't tan.

She was tired. She rubbed the palm of her hand between her eyebrows. Buffy had a permanent crease in her forehead now just like Giles. Faith was trying not to get it. Saving strange blonde boys wasn't helping. "I got saddled with 'Faith' so I'm thinking you might take some time, come up with a good one. I can suggest avoiding 'Hope' and 'Charity', but I don't think you were considering those anyway and the only English names I know are Rupert and Wesley and both of those honk. Oh! and Christopher Robin."

"None of which have any particular elegance."

"There is no name on this planet stupider than 'Buffy'."

"That's not a name," he stated, then glanced up for confirmation. She saluted him with her glass and grinned cheerfully and he grimaced, "Yes, that is inarguable. But Hermione comes a close second."

She nodded gravely and with a truce established they went back to prodding their respective plates.

"So what do you know?"

"Pardon?"

"You don't know your name; you don't know what side you are on. What do you know? Start there." She flopped a fry at him.

"I want to live."

"That's a start."

"I hate my father."

"Another good one."

"No…"

"Okay, maybe not good so much, but..." he waved her silent with a brush of his hand.

"No, I fear my father." He shook his head, correcting himself. "No, I _despise_ my father, but I fear becoming him. And while I'm not sure what side **I** am on, I think I have finally recognized that **he** is on the wrong one."

"See? Getting better all the time." She watched him take another pull of his cider. She watched him worry the side of his thumbnail. His hands didn't look particularly used to rough treatment. Finally she got bored. "Ralph's a good English name."

"Wha? Oh, yes, I suppose so. But not for…well, not for me."

He went back to gnawing his fingernail and she tried another take. "Get your friends to help."

"I don't really have friends. More of henchmen. And I left them with," he paused long enough to make her curious before continuing, "their fathers."

"So, get your enemies to help," she threw a coaster across the table to make him drop his incredulous face, "Hey, it worked for me." He pulled the rest of the stack of coasters and left her with no ammo. "So who else?"

"Why would there be … what? You are quite confusing."

Faith rapped on the table twice and said, "Dude, look, you don't know me, I don't know you and I bet that I am the **one** person on this green earth you can talk to who won't blow sunshine up your skirt or assume you are an idiot. Or put you in a room without windows in a jacket that doesn't fasten up the front. Here's your chance to work it out." She took his silence for consent and brazened on. "Who did you leave your henchmen with?"

"Their…families."

"Aaand?" She drawled the 'a' while waving her glass in a flopped over figure eight. It was as irritating as she'd hoped and had the unexpected bonus of catching the bartender's eye. She couldn't just flash two fingers at him because she couldn't remember whether palm forward or back was the insult, so she pointed at each of them in turn and hoped the guy got the hint.

"My father, groveling in the mud before a gibbering madman. A madman, I might add, who is using my mother as a social secretary from Hell and our family as a personal bank on an impossible mission to reshape the world in his image." He flattened one arm on the table and laid his head in the crook of his elbow, the very picture of a dejected aristocrat.

"And I'm betting it's not a particularly nice image."

"You are possibly the oddest person I've met this week," he said directly to the table.

"Dude, if he was making the world a better place, would you be here sitting with me?" She tapped the table near his face and he turned, still hunched over, but looking up at her.

"No," he said, and straightened to play with his glass again. "I'd be on my knees in front of him."

"Hard on the knees."

"Quite."

"So's getting the snot knocked out of you in an alley." He glared over the rim of his glass. "Though there are other alley acts that are just as hard on the knees." She timed it right and could see him wince as he huffed cider up his sinuses. "Now don't you feel better?"

"Not particularly." He blew his nose into a real cloth handkerchief just like Giles'. _Must be something in the water._

"Drink some more. So on the one side we have the gibbering madman and on the other we have …"

"A doddering fool."

"Welcome to my life." He glanced sharply and she recanted. "Not doddering. He is a real stuffed shirt, though."

"Stuffed with what?"

"And you think I'm random? Never mind, who else? On the dodderer's side.

"An overbearing bookworm, a poor relation with impossible luck, and my nemesis."

"Are you **sure** you aren't living my life?"

"I have better hair," he sneered.

"I have better tits," she countered. He glanced down, met her eyes again and tilted his head in acknowledgement of the obvious. She said, "So we have the doddering fool with his Scoobies," she waved away his look of incomprehension, "versus the madman in the mud."

"Homicidal madman," he corrected.

"That makes a difference."

"I didn't think it did." At his unemotional tone, Faith went icy, but he continued slowly, feeling his way through his thought as he said the words, "but now perhaps I think it does. I think I could kill, in fact, I'm fairly certain that I could." And she twisted her knee, unseen beneath the table, to check that the knife in her boot hadn't moved too much, "But I think I've decided that I don't want to kill for him." The introspective look on his face dropped and was replaced by a crinkle around the eyes that spoke of exhaustion, or perhaps self-pity. "Are you happy now? Comfortable, fed, warm?"

Faith was silent for a moment, as she considered the level of bitching she'd kept up since coming north to Europe, the way the misty fog hid the vampires, the way Giles snapped, then apologized. She missed the sun. She shrugged "I couldn't stay the way I was."

"I rather liked the way I was, thank you." And his voice was so clipped, so Wesley, that Faith laughed.

"Dude, I've got it."

"The solution to my dilemma? Or just the precipitate?

"Hunh?

"Never mind. It's a Potions term."

"That's the English way of saying chemistry, right? Like fag for cigarette?"

"What's a cigarette?"

"Hunh?" She shook her head and went back to her flash of brilliance. "Anyway, Victor. There's a name for you."

"Victor?"

"Victor. British guys **like** puns. It says so in the tourist guide."

He murmured, "So Draco left to join the…" he shot a quick glance at her, "the enemy and Victor returns to fight for the side of M-sunlight and sweets."

"Draco? Your name is Draco? And you've only now started hating your father?"

He raised an imperious finger. "May I remind you? Buffy."

"Yeah, okay, you got that one. But I'm liking Faith more and more." She grinned into the remains of her plate. "So not Victor?"

"No. At any rate, it's already taken."

"Lemme guess, the nemesis?"

"No, our side." He waved the words away. "My father's side. A henchman."

"I can see why you'd want to avoid the copy."

"I suspect that I'm just going to have to retain my own. Myself and my name with all it entails."

"If it helps any," she said to the tabletop," And I'm not saying it will, the first part's the hardest. Walking in the first time. No wait, " she jabbed the table with a finger, "there's a second wave, the explaining the whats and the whys. And don't ever screw up," she looked up, " 'cause then it all goes to Hell …." At his expression, she finished, "You know, I think I'm just gonna shut up and keep my advice to myself."

His smile was rueful and his voice quiet. "I suppose it does help, knowing that I'm not alone."

"Redemption track. Unite." She raised her fist. He looked at it blankly, so she dropped her hand to her glass. "You got somewhere to stay? I'm thinking home is a no go."

He ran his finger through the puddle of condensation on the table, drawing it out in a squiggle that might be an S. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I think I do."

He stood and extended his hand, curiously formal, and she took it with a wry smile. _No hugging in Britain._ "Thank you for your assistance. I sincerely hope that you never know whether or not you have helped." He waved his other hand and she braced for an attack but he just muttered something about livid gates and left without looking back.

She rubbed her forehead again. A hotel pillow of tired hit her right between the eyes and she rolled her neck to clear it. _Woof. Jet lag or something. Welcome to the country where mugging victims have Masterpiece Theatre plotlines and Badger Bitter is a beer._ She leaned over and drained her glass. "Son of a bitch," she said without any particular heat.

"S'th'matter, then?" the bartender grunted.

She counted out the oddly sized paper money with care onto the bar. "Jerk stiffed me with the check," she answered.

"S' allus the fancy dress wankers, eh?"

"Hope whoever he goes to makes him eat a worm or two before putting up with his shit. Drink a cup of bile or whatever." She grinned back as she climbed the steps back into the London night.


End file.
